Google News Adds YouTube Videos

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Google News has integrated video footage to its aggregated news results using the Plus Box technology which has become a staple of the Google Universal Search experience.

The video news footage which is served within Google News results is now provided by YouTube content partners like CBS and the videos are hosted within the YouTube player. Being a new addition (or test) by Google News, the addition to video may soon level the playing field with Yahoo, which has included Yahoo produced & 3rd party video footage into Yahoo News for years.

In case readers cannot view videos themselves on Google News, here is some video footage I captured of the integration:

As more and more web users also turn to services like Google to get their fill of daily news, the service may also give YouTube more leverage in sealing deals with content providers; and open up a whole new syndication outlet & marketing channel for smaller video publishing companies and video bloggers.

It was hinted yesterday at Search Engine Strategies that video would play a larger role in news search, and that time has come.

I noticed this when a top Google News search result (“Google courts Yahoo”) about the merger between Yahoo and Microsoft sourced “reutersvideo”. I was completely aghast that Google would not disclose that this was in fact a YouTube video — the byline read “reutersvideo”.

Today, the news is no longer all that new, but a Google News search sorted by date and limited to only news from Reuters does not return the Reuters news story — presumably because the link provided yesterday was in fact to YouTube, not to Reuters.

So the Reuters news has essentially been deleted from Googles index (indeed, it was never even entered into the index).

I am totally amazed that Reuters could be gagged this way, that Google would incorrectly state in the byline that a video came from Reuters Video — when in fact the source was YouTube, and also that users can be so easily duped to believe that Google is not fooling them by doing this.